Tuesday, September 26, 2017

A meme that seems to have taken the paranormal world by storm over the past few years is an intriguing
phenomenon called “The Mandela Effect”. It is so named for
Nelson Mandela and the fact that a substantially large amount of the
population seems to remember this beloved elder statesman dying as
much as two decades before he actually did. The subject matter of
this phenomenon is too broad and extensive for me to do more than
give it a cursory description here, so I strongly suggest you do a
search for it...and keep your mind open as you do. A fair amount of
search results will be of the standard issue debunking type, but a
few will take you down some interesting paths. These mass
“mis-rememberings” range from things as trivial as the spellings
of cereal brands and the titles of children's books to the location
of the heart inside the human body (which many of you probably
remember being slightly under the left lung...as I do...well it no
longer is...and it “never” was...it's in the center of our bodies
now...where it always wasn't).

The implications of this
phenomenon are something I've played with since I was a young child,
as I was beset by what I came to call “reality shifts” from a
really early age...and my observations of them and the tentative
conclusions reached paralleled nicely with the increasing notion that
physical reality itself may not be the firm and fixed thing that our
culture assumes it is, but a far more fluid substance...if it
actually “exists” in the way we think of as “existing” at
all. It may just be a construct or a projection. (That's how I see
it myself: a large learning tool...a playground/schoolroom/thrill
ride for consciousness.)

When I was in 1st grade I
had an initial taste of the Mandela Effect well before I was equipped
to emotionally deal with it.

I was a daydreamer...especially
when in an environment that did not challenge my intellect, which
would be an excellent description of the public school system then
and now. Like a lot of scruffy little manlings, I had two or three
outfits that I wore constantly, and that was about it. One of these
outfits incorporated an olive-colored sweater vest that buttoned in
the front with a series of brown mottled buttons, each of which had
their own distinct pattern and four holes for thread.

Being
bored beyond belief by the curriculum, I had pretty much memorized
the patterns in these buttons as I would play with them constantly,
taking my thumbnail and trying to ram a corner of it into each of the
holes in the button peering up at me from it's position over my
belly. I would say that I knew these buttons like the back of my
hands, but I knew them much more: the back of my hands were not all
that interesting to me at that juncture...but the buttons were my
late 60's fidget spinner.

One day while readying myself for a
REALLY intense burst of random daydreaming, I looked down and the
four-holed buttons now only had two holes. I was extremely startled
by this. I looked at each button and verified that the patterns in
the mottling of the buttons were the same. I realized that there was
NO chance that my mother would have been able to find buttons with
the EXACT same random color pattern and sew them on this vest while I
wasn't looking, so I did what a lot of young children do when
confronted with something totally contrary to everything they
understand:

I completely freaked out.

My freak out was
so extreme that the principal (an avuncular grandfatherish figure
named Mr. Albert) decided to drive me home. Wanting to figure out
what I was ranting about, the principal informed me that his car was
only capable of making left turns, which allowed him to take a long
and circuitous route while asking a barrage of questions.

I'm not sure what he was able to
conclude (if anything)...memory fades of these years...but my
conclusion was that the reality that I thought was a fixed and solid
thing, wasn't. Thus, at a VERY young age I started questioning the
fundamental basis of physical reality itself. Once I got a few more
years and words under me, I called this a “reality shift”. It
was the first of several, but probably the most impacting...it
changed the course of my life. Later as I discovered science
fiction, Eastern Philosophy, hallucinogens and quantum physics, these
incidents made more sense within my expanding worldview. Now when
things happen of this nature I don't even bat an eye, as I don't
think much of this stuff around us it “real” in the way most
people seem to define it.

By my teens I was fairly blasé
about my “reality shifts”. For about six years I worked at a
hotel in various capacities. The hotel was right next to the
apartment complex where my small family lived. For a while I worked
an early morning shift and would walk the same path through the same
courtyard every morning. At one point after a summer weekend I saw
that some reveler had smashed a bottle of blackberry brandy into the
ground. It was the same coffee syrup-like swill that I would drink
to clear my throat before a gig with my then band, Soft War, so I
knew it well. The bottle had a dark purplish label...for about two
weeks, at which point it decided that it would be much happier as a
broken GINGER brandy bottle.

When I first noticed this, I
inspected the area to see if there were any more bottles of this
Elixir of the Gods laying about. Nope. This was the lone one...and
the pattern of breakage was exactly the same. It would have been
practically impossible to fake such a thing without making molds and
spending a fair bit of money in a very narrow time window, just to
startle some young poor teen whose destiny was to fade into
middle-aged obscurity in a glorified tent in a tedious cultural
backwater, having accomplished very little of public importance. The
bottle remained lodged in the lawn until things warmed up and some
groundskeeper decided that it posed a threat to his lawnmower. For
my part, I pondered it with wry amusement, always asking myself if it
had not always been a ginger brandy bottle and I was just simply
mistaken. The brain does things like that.

It's hard to say
either way. I always had mixed feelings about the topic until the
Mandela Effect started poking it's head into the mainstream culture.
Now I have a lot more validation for these experiences, which is
comforting in a small way...my brain may be in better shape than I
thought it was...but in a MUCH larger way it's pretty
disconcerting...as all of physical reality may not be.

Food
for thought, basically. If it's just John Ludi misremembering
various trivial things, it's one thing...but if MILLIONS of people
misremember the VERY SAME THINGS in THE VERY SAME WAYS, it points to
something a LOT larger.

Which, of course, points to the
question at the heart of almost everything: Why?

Thursday, September 7, 2017

Thursday, August 31, 2017

One of the various "predictions" (or as I like to call it, "stating the obvious") I had made going way back, is that when the edge of the cliff finally came close, there would be a spiraling collective and individuated insanity that would spread like wildfire, almost exponentially, until it became every man (woman) for him/herself.

Judging from people's behavior over the past month, online and off, I'm thinking we are well into the beginning stages of it. The election was a pretty big milestone in and of itself, but I've watched people acting out in a variety of ways lately...and divide into smaller and smaller factions as part of it. Everyone is having their biases tested (myself included) and some are reacting by opening up and trying to reach a deeper level of understanding, while most are retrenching and clinging to whatever serves as a life raft for their prior set of assumptions

Pretty disheartening, but inevitable. Oddly enough, I've found myself becoming calmer in the midst of this. Maybe it's that I've worried about it so long that now that it seems to be here, I can let the worry finally subside and accept whatever fate has in store for me...and for all of us.

All I can really say as a "solution" to it...as there IS no actual solution...is try to be kind to one another...and patient...we are ALL assholes in our own special ways...none of us is infallible, myself included. Myself especially.

And don't put your faith in anyone, especially some other asshole. They will let you down...and the level of faith people put in some guru or leader is roughly commensurate to the level of disappointment they will induce in their followers when their pedestal collapses.

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

The second installment of our Ludi & Fitzpatrick recording project is another lovely and poignant song about lost love by Mr. Fitzpatrick, who also sings the lead on this one. Really happy with how this turned out. Those of you who may have heard us play this one around the area might notice a bit of a change in the arrangement in favor of a dynamic build.